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U.S. Calls On China To End Hacking; Start Cyberspace Dialogue
New submitter trickymyth writes "For the first time, the United States has mentioned the People's Republic of China in relation to cyber crime, officially acknowledging what has been long suspected by private security experts and the U.S. business community. The Obama Administration seeks to get the Chinese government to acknowledge the problem, to cease any state-sponsored hacker activity, and to start a dialogue on normative behavior on the internet. This announcement follows the recent 60-page report from the American cybersecurity firm Mandiant, who spent two years compiling evidence against the so-called 'Comment Crew.' They traced IP addresses, common behavior, and tools to track the group's activity, which led to a Shanghai neighborhood home to the People's Liberation Army (PLA's) Unit 61398. This tracking came at the behest of the Times, who has experienced some trouble with hacking in the past. The Chinese government rejected the report as 'unprofessional' and 'lacking technical evidence.' This announcement also comes amid a delicate leadership transition in China and numerous new reports on the vulnerability of U.S. business and government networks to attack."
This is the same country they has a national firewall infrastructure to use against its own citzens. I'm sure their morals will guide them right when it comes to using hacking as a weapon of war.
It's ok for the US but no one else?
Guess some left hand isn't talking to the right hand.
Infuriate left and right
yep, because there's no way sending a remote controlled robot after a team of hackers could go wrong.
Call me hypocritical, but preventing Iran from having a nuclear bomb for the safety of the middle eastern region (and global security) is definitely worthwhile.
What is the purpose of China's hacks? Mostly economical, not exactly an apples to apples comparison here.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
the U.S. WILL go in and do what is in their best interest.
I don't know why I have a feeling that US'es best interest is to fix their security flaws. Otherwise... what, will you do the same when e.g. Belarus (as a country) or a group of Russian hackers (acting "in private name") decides they'd like to test US tubez?
Or is one of your kinky pleasures to pay taxes that will end into the bank accounts of the "defense industry"?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Seems to me that this is like asking for a truce when we're losing. They've got no reason to say yes.
Fortunately, this isn't a battle we have to lose. Yeah, I think we have to admit that every grandma-box running Windows 98 is going to be a spam-spewing zombie for the foreseeable future, but the corporations that make the juiciest targets should also be capable of at least some self-defense. If thy IP block offends thee, cut it off. Social engineering is always going to trump user education, but we can at least make it an arms race.
At least it's not nukes, which are harder to walk away from. That means we also don't have Mutually Assured Destruction. They're going to do it even if they sign a treaty saying that they won't, so we're going to have to hunker down and deal. Asking them to call it a draw isn't going to get us anywhere.
Imagine it's 2003, and Slashdot has an article about the widely criticized Iraqi invasion. An American makes a post just like yours:
"But invading Kuwait was ok, huh?"
Would you have embraced that sentiment? Would the moderators have modded it up?
I imagine that poster would be flooded with indignant replies containing variations of "two wrongs don't make a right"
Now imagine again that it's 2003. We know that North Korea is close to getting nukes, and their leader is literally insane. Far away, we have a bit of unreliable intelligence from some dude that was tortured and told us Saddam had WMDs, that we know is unreliable (because the guys that tortured him and told us about it also told us that it was unreliable). We also know that even if these WMDs do exist, they are not nukes. Also, unlike North Korea, Saddam was a major asshole but was not actually literally insane (at least not more than any other asshole politician). We know that if we take Saddam's regime out, we'll have to be there for a very, very long time to prevent an even bigger asshole from taking over. Meanwhile, our friends in South Korea would be happy to take over North Korea if we took out Kim Jong-Il's regime, and unite North and South Korea, significantly helping the entire population of North Korea.
10 Years prior, your daddy (president at that time) and your current VP (Secretary of Defense at that time) had both said invading Iraq to go after Saddam would have been obviously stupid. Your current VP even explained why it would be utterly stupid in an interview with C-SPAN in 1994.
Which country do you invade?
that's true, China doesn't have the mortgage-backed securities and subprime lending we saw in the U.S.
But while those things certainly help fan a bubble, you can still have a bubble without them. There was no subprime lending or Tulip-backed securities, yet the Tulip bubble still took place.
So what incentives exactly does China have to stop hacking? Stop a cyber war? Their hackers are better than yours. Afraid after sanctions? It's unlikely enough countries would be willing to stop trading. Best thing to do imo is to upgrade US's digital infrastructure. Solve the root of the problem.